The former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said with the “body of evidence” against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, FBI Director James Comey “really has no choice but to refer this for indictment.”
“It does appear as though the administration continues to push for, if you will, double and triple and quadruple measuring,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), now chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, told Fox Business Network. “But as you know, we have communications back and forth, the president from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail. We have 1,300 sensitive documents, 22 classified at the highest level.”
“This is well past anyone claiming that they didn’t know.”
Clinton told ABC on Sunday that her email scandal “is very much like Benghazi… the Republicans are going to continue to use it, beat up on me.”
“I understand that. That’s the way they are,” she said.
Her appearance came after 22 emails the State Department originally planned to release with Friday’s batch were withheld because of top-secret classification.
Issa said Clinton’s claim that the email scandal “has no more relevance in Benghazi” is right.
“It is just as relevant as four people dying unnecessarily because of her mismanagement,” he said.
“In this case, she made a choice. She made a choice to have a private server. She made a choice to use it with highly sensitive material. She made a choice to receive and retransmit documents that should have been classified when they came to her and have later been classified,” Issa continued. “And these choices are really what the prosecution would be about.”
“You know, as somebody who has a head full of classified information, Hillary Clinton has an obligation to be able to not disseminate that information, to know the difference and to know when she sees material that should not be transmitted in the open. And particularly, in such a risky situation that she created by her choice.”
Clinton called it “a continuation of the story that has been playing out for months.”
“I take classified information very seriously. You know, you can’t get information off the classified system in the State Department to put onto an unclassified system, no matter what that system is,” she told ABC.
“We were very specific about that and you — when you receive information, of course, there has to be some markings, some indication that someone down the chain had thought that this was classified and that was not the case.”
Issa said Clinton has to answer the question: “Is this material that on its face somebody of her intelligence and experience would know it was sensitive?”
“And that determination has to be made. But it’s pretty obvious that you can’t have 1,300 documents that are all are partially redacted and 22 at the highest level in which nothing is being released and have somebody say, ‘Well, I didn’t know it was sensitive,'” the congressman said.
“You know, the one thing about Hillary Rodham Clinton that I know having worked with her is she is smart and she knows what she sees and that works well for her in her job. But it also makes her very much responsible when she traffics in sensitive information — it should not be on an unclassified server, should never have been on hers.”
Issa opined that “it’s important that the director act sooner rather than later” on potential charges.
“He is, in fact, a nonpartisan appointee. He’s supposed to be and historically they have been above being influenced by the administration,” he said.
“The later he acts the more it looks like he is influenced. And to be candid, not as a pro-Hillary person, but this is something that primary voters should know that either she’s been cleared of or indicted for. They shouldn’t be guessing between two candidates.”
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